Various Artists

North/South/East/West

Warp gathers top artists from four locales-- NYC, L.A., London, and Glasgow-- to create an all-star wonky album featuring FlyLo, Skream, FaltyDL, and more.

As far as names for musical niches go, few are as stylistically far-flung-- and unhelpfully imprecise-- as "wonky." Flying Lotus isn't really dubstep, and Rustie isn't quite hip-hop, but they're both wonky-- which, as Martin Clark observed a couple of years back, initially emerged as more of a theme than a genre. That theme unites so many veins of inspiration that a closer look at the sound reveals things either uniquely specific (Glasgow's "aquacrunk" scene) or so descriptively wide-- Philadelphia's Starkey calls his music "street bass"-- that they're no more helpful. So wonky is one of those know-it-when-you-hear-it things, a digital pulse of unstable time signatures that aims to unite the sonic commonalities between hip-hop, dubstep, electro, UK funky, IDM, and any other potential source of those synthesized basslines' shared DNA.

Gathering them all up into one place for an attempted overview is the kind of project that risks becoming both illuminating and confusing. North/South/East/West was originally meant to be a collaborative art/music project between photographer Shaun Bloodworth and designer Stuart Hammersley, who initially intended to highlight a few artists from the London dubstep world for Warp subsidiary Bleep.com. It was after they took a similar project to Los Angeles' beat-music underground that they decided to tie the two scenes together, and throw in two others-- Glasgow and New York-- to complete a sort of four-corners wonky overview. The final product mostly adheres to a certain intangible sense of style without actually sounding like its artists are all following the same route.

The UK's North/South axis of the collection shares the most common musical background; most of these artists can trace a direct lineage to UK garage, whether it's through grime, dubstep, or UK funky. The London and Bristol artists that were the project's initial focus include two early catalysts of post-garage dance niches, with dubstep innovator Skream providing the brooding, kick-heavy throb of "Slumfunk" and UK funky curator Geeneus contributing the vintage Detroit inflections of "Ultrafunkula".

Their commonalities are in the fine details (foamy low-end; a certain glowing cast to the synth sounds) rather than the bigger rhythmic picture, which is why Headhunter's "Collecting Butterflies"-- combining uptempo, borderline-rave synth and snare with a growling mid-tempo bassline-- is a good selection to tie the two together. Glasgow, meanwhile, is represented by the aforementioned "aquacrunk" variant popularized by Rustie, whose "Bad Science" takes Southern-bounce to a hyperactive extreme. Given the other two slices of the Glasgow scene on display-- the night-ending dubstep swoon of Taz Buckfaster's elegaic "Au Revoir", and Hudson Mohawke's handclap-driven, cathedral-sized "FUSE", the most anthemic track on the comp-- it's the closest there is to an easy stylistic convergence.

Things get more spread out and fractured where the American coasts are concerned, and the only real commonality that the New York and L.A. artists hold is a general sense that they owe a bit more to left-field breakbeat and jazz. The musicians that represent NYC here find a lot of elbow room in that particular area, even as they all have the same tendency to cultivate similar post-hip-hop atmosphere. Kotchy's "You Know You" extrapolates a strange sort of mournful soul-jazz out of a boom-bap rhythm and lets it flutter in and out of space, switching up between cocktail-bar piano and distorted 80s funk synthesizers to disorienting effect. Mike Slott's "When Giants Meet" is an escalating series of sharp detours-- truncated riffs, quick blasts of notes, melodies that travel in and out of frame-- over a fidgety drumbeat. Next to those two, FaltyDL's mid-tempo acid-jazz electric piano meditation "Some Day My Queen Will Come" sounds like an outtake from a mid-90s Mo Wax comp.

Ironically, even though Bloodworth and Hammersley's visit to L.A. sparked the multi-city nature of North/South/East/West, that scene feels like the most loosely represented. Nothing really unites the two Flying Lotus tracks (the brief but impactful demi-Asian g-funk of L.A. EP cut "Rickshaw" and Matthew David's soupy, beatless ambient reworking of "Comet Course") with the quirky, baroque contribution by Daedelus ("A Bloodworth"). And given how sprawling and creatively active the Brainfeeder collective is-- it's the same scene that gave us next-level beat futurists like Nosaj Thing, the Gaslamp Killer, and Ras_G-- the West-representing side of this comp feels like surface-scraping in comparison.

As a collection of tracks, North/South/East/West is a solid effort with plenty of highlights, and even with the stylistic divergence it doesn't throw listeners off too much, opting to sequence for mood rather than regional affinity. As an art project, it certainly looks nice-- the photographs and visual design of the limited-edition package rope together an evocative visual aesthetic that complements the music's mood of darkness without bleakness. (The limited-edition CD is a fancy-packaged art piece; more casual listeners will likely settle for the digital download, which includes individual artwork with each music file.) And as a summary of a multi-fronted hydra of a scene, it does as well as can be expected-- whether it's a genre or just a theme, the fact that it can be alluring in so many different ways, none of which have been mined to the point of cliché, should be enough to forgive the sprawl.